Google is rolling network monitoring into its public cloud offerings with the introduction of the Network Intelligence Center, which seeks to help enterprises in the process of switching to the cloud address performance and optimization challenges.

“Adoption of hybrid- and multicloud is absolutely critical for organizations to remain agile,” wrote Shailesh Shukla, VP of networking product management at Google, in a post on the Google Cloud blog. “To realize this vision you need proactive network operations that can predict and heal network failures, driven by [artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)] recommendations and remediation.”

According to Google, 75% of network outages and performance issues are the result of misconfiguration.

To address these challenges, Network Intelligence Center packages four tools designed to help customers visualize, test, and monitor the performance of their network. But in typical Google fashion, none of them will be completely finished at launch. Google's Connectivity Test and Network Topology tools will launch in beta, while the Performance Dashboard and Firewall Metrics & Insights utilities will launch in alpha.

Google says Network Topology will make it easier for users to visualize their network.

“Visibility is especially important in cloud to gain trust and confidence since customers do not own the infrastructure,” Shukla wrote. “Visualizing cloud topologies is also complicated by the fact that a cloud network is really a mesh, making it hard to understand and navigate differences between on-premises and cloud environments.”

Using Google's Network Topology feature, customers can now visualize and monitor how users are being served around the globe, allowing them to proactively pinpoint problems. Google says if there is a problem with the network, users can go back up to six weeks to find the origin of the problem to help speed up diagnosis.

Google's Connectivity Test, on the other hand, aims to help customers diagnose, verify, and address the challenge to prevent future outages. Key to this is helping customers figure out whether the problem affecting the network even exists in Google Cloud first place.

Once the user has identified the problem, Connectivity Test allows users to test and verify the impact of a configuration change before implementing it.

Using Performance Dashboard, customers can get real-time insights into Packet loss and latency at a per-project level.

And Firewall Metrics & Insights provides additional visibility into firewall rules and usage, which Google says will help customers optimize their firewall rules.